Remembering on the city’s margins: the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris^*

* The Museum of the History of Immigration. In general, when referring to the pre-2013 institution, I will use the acronym CNHI. Post-2013 references will generally adopt the MHI acronym. All translations are the author’s own unless otherwise stated.

Abstract

This article explores the role played by the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration (MHI) in the broader political debates relating to collective memories of immigration in France. The discussion focuses on the ways in which the MHI, as both a national institution and a civil society network, engages with diverse publics from Paris, the Ile-de-France banlieues (suburbs) and other French regions which have historically been the site of significant migrant settlement. The main question underpinning the article’s discussion is as follows: how and to what extent is a ‘dialogic’ and ‘polyvocal’ approach to the history of immigration in France reflected in the networks and partnerships which the institution fosters with diverse and urban populations? After providing a brief historical introduction to how the MHI came to be established, the article then focuses on one of the ways in which the MHI has recently sought greater visibility via a high-profile publicity campaign in the summer of 2013. The third part of the article discusses the different ways in which the MHI seeks to move beyond a centre-margin paradigm within its own museological practice, whilst at the same time remaining constrained by the very centre-margin paradigm it otherwise seeks to displace.

Keywords:

• Paris
• Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration
• memory
• heritage
• networks

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Erratum

Notes

* The Museum of the History of Immigration. In general, when referring to the pre-2013 institution, I will use the acronym CNHI. Post-2013 references will generally adopt the MHI acronym. All translations are the author’s own unless otherwise stated.

1. On the question of colonial memory and challenging ‘reductively national accounts’, see also Forsdick (2010, 187).

2. The author visited the research site in July 2013 and January 2014.

3. Gastaut (2012, 334) further points out that between 2002 and 2012, five new restrictive laws on immigration were passed, under Sarkozy as Interior Minister and then as President. On the construction of immigration as a social and cultural problem, see also Alec Hargreaves (2015, 228) who discusses the ways in which the changes to nationality laws, increasingly restrictive laws on immigration, the various headscarf affairs and the 2004 and 2010 laws on the veil and burqa also illustrate how anxieties about immigrants and Muslims in particular have become a feature of the political and media landscape over the last thirty years or so.

4. Author translation of original French.

5. As article 1 of the French Constitution states: ‘La France est une République indivisible …’ [‘France is an indivisible Republic’]. Constitution du 4 octobre 1958 (JORF n° 0238 du 5 octobre 1958, page 9151), available online at http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/Droit-francais/Constitution/Constitution-du-4-octobre-1958#ancre2178_0_1_1 [accessed 16 December 2015].

6. From the start of the 1990s, an association calling for a museum of immigration, the Association pour un musée de l’immigration had been set up by historian Gérard Noiriel (See El-Yazami and Schwartz 2001 for more details).

7. On the history of human zoos, see Bancel et al. 2011. In their introduction to the volume, Bancel et al. highlight the present-day echoes of colonial-age human zoos, citing the polemic which arose in France in 2011, when during the Année des outre-mer, an exhibition on ‘les cultures ultramarines’ from France’s overseas territories was organised at the Jardin d’acclimatation – a site, which historically had been used to exhibit populations from France’s overseas territories.

8. For further discussion on this, see Green (2007) and Murphy (2007).

9. See description of the project at http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/la-cite/le-projet-de-la-cite [accessed 01 April 2014]. Author translation from French original.

10. Indeed, according to Dominic Thomas, the activities and approach of the CNHI, which focuses ‘less [on] conservation and display, than [on] narrating, documenting and recording a particular history’ place it beyond the definition of a museum as set out by the International Council of Museums (2012, 128).

11. The MHI does not explicitly define immigration in the presentation of its scientific and cultural project (see Le Projet scientifique et culturel de la Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/sites/default/files/musee-numerique/documents/ext_media_fichier_245_psc_cite.pdf) [accessed 18 July 2017] but as part of its pedagogical dimension, it does contain a number of definitions of key terms such as immigrant, refugee, foreigner, undocumented immigrant (sans-papier). Nancy Green shows that the definition of immigration was the subject of debate amongst the academic steering committee, with some arguing for a chronological approach to the definition, going right back to the Burgondes and Visigoth population movements. Some have argued that immigration started with the creation of the nation-state, i.e. from the French Revolution onwards whilst other historians claim that immigration should be defined in terms of the subjective ‘experience of migration’. Finally the decision was taken to focus on immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Green 2007, 248–249). Forsdick (2010) and Dixon (2012) also highlight an apparent lack of extensive problematisation of the term ‘immigration’. Forsdick argues that there is a ‘conflation of different modes of migration, in which there is a risk that the socio-historical specificities of colonial and postcolonial diasporisation are ground down’ (Forsdick 2010, 178). Dixon claims that the permanent exhibition leads visitors to believe that ‘the only ‘authentic’ migration experience worthy of note at CNHI involved international movement across cultures and borders’, hence excluding internal migration and migration from France’s overseas departments and territories (Dixon 2012, 80, 81).

12. After a period of visitor number growth in 2013 and 2014, aided by the presidential inauguration of the MHI by François Hollande in December 2014 in addition to the 2013 publicity campaign, the MHI 2015 annual report refers again to overall decreasing numbers due, in part, to the wave of terror attacks affecting the capital, especially cancelled school group visits which have principally affected the Aquarium, whereas the Museum continues to see growth (L’Etablissement public du Palais de Porte Dorée (EPPPD) 2014, 2015).

13. Décret no 2006–1388 du 16 novembre 2006 portant création de l’Etablissement public. de la porte Dorée – Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration. Accessed 01 April 2014. http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/sites/default/files/musee-numerique/documents/ext_media_fichier_295_joe_20061117_0266_0025.pdf. Author translation of French original.

14. See http://www.rahmi.fr/prog/ch_memoire_immigration.php?destina=memoire-immigration [accessed 27 August 2014].

15. INSEE is the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies. See http://www.insee.fr/fr/ppp/bases-de-donnees/recensement/populations-legales/pages2013/pdf/dep93.pdf [accessed 2 April 2014]. According to the l’Observatoire départemental (SOD) de la Direction de la stratégie, de l’organisation et de l’évaluation. (DSOE), Seine-Saint-Denis had the highest numbers of non-French residents in Ile-de-France in 2011, making up 21% or of its population or ca. 300, 000 individuals (mainly from Africa to Asia). See http://data.seine-saint-denis.fr/politiques/La%20Seine-Saint-Denis/Population%20et%20territoire/Documents/Decryptage(s)%202%20-%20La%20population%20etrangere%20par%20nationalites%20en%20Seine-Saint-Denis%20-%20Etat%20des%20lieux%20en%202011%20et%20evolution%202006-2011%20-%202016.pdf; [accessed 17 July 2017].

16. Often referred to as France’s ninth art, bande desinnée is a French language comic-strip.

17. A creation by choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and photographer/film-maker Gilles Delmas. For more details, see http://artsvisuels.seine-saint-denis.fr/La-Zon-Mai-13-septembre-28-octobre.html [accessed 29 August 2014].

18. Presentation of La Galerie des dons, available online at http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/la-galerie-des-dons [accessed 21 August 2014]. Author translation of French original.

19. Author translation of French original.

20. Mazabrun cites Fabrice Grognet, ‘Quand “l”étranger’ devient patrimoine français’, in Hommes & Migrations, n ° 1267, mai-juin 2007. Author translation from the French original.

21. Presentation of La Galerie des dons, available online at: http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/la-galerie-des-dons [accessed 21 August 2014]. Author translation from French original. The overarching nation frame which is evident within the name and practices of MHI is replicated in other European contexts, as highlighted by Grosfoguel, Le Bot and Poli (2011) who argue that unlike in the U.S., European museums in countries such as Denmark, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands or the United Kingdom have been reluctant to tackle the issue of immigration head-on, preferring often to approach it in a piecemeal manner in museum structures which receive community or private funding rather than state-funding. In this sense, the MHI is a unique institution in Europe in that it is a national state-funded museum.

22. Author translations of exhibition rubrics from French original.